How Twitter has changed the Political Landscape

It used to be the only way you could find out what was going on in government was to subscribe to cable and watch boringly long hours of your legislators on C-SPAN. And to those of you who still find the time to engage in that sleep inducing activity and TIVO (or DVR) it to put Congressional highlights (or lowlights as the case may be) up on YouTube, I thank you profusely. You do this country a great service and your names should be recorded and found in the annals of history for generations to come.

I’ve always been a technology geek, staying on the bleeding edge of technology (early adopter), and I found Twitter when it was only about 9 months old and had just over a million users. I immediately grasped it’s amazing potential for driving the political conversation. From the beginning of my introduction to this tool, I have believed it to be one of the most amazing tools for marketing and communicating any message you wish to share.

I came to work on Jason Chaffetz’s campaign just after Utah’s GOP Convention because as a state delegate, I had committed to my fellow precinct members that I would do all in my power to remove Chris Cannon from office. With Jason just 9 votes shy of the 60% of the delegate vote necessary to win the nomination, I really had no choice if I wanted to remain true to that commitment. Having started several internet related businesses, I understood internet marketing and promotion, and I knew the right combination of tools applied at the right time could make a huge difference to Jason’s campaign. I took the time to evaluate his internet presence and it was woefully inadequate.

So right after convention, I called up Jason’s campaign manager, Jennifer Scott and offered my services to the campaign. She asked me for a workup or a brief of my ideas and within a couple of hours I had it committed to paper and in her email inbox. She was impressed, and before I knew it, I was thrust into a leadership position within Jason’s campaign, managing the entire online team of about 150 volunteers. They were awesome, and we had them using Facebook, YouTube, and we even set up a blog to communicate between online volunteers. But my favorite tool to use was Twitter.

You see we set up what we called the “Rapid Response Team” and anytime we wanted to get a message to the team immediately to get them to act, I would post a message on Twitter which if the volunteers had it set up properly would text them that message to their cellphones and right away they would respond to the call (We couldn’t have done it without you RR Team!). We ended up beating a six-term, well funded incumbent by 20 points!

I chuckle now, because during the campaign I could hardly get Jason to use those technology tools (although he took to Facebook like a fish to water), and now it’s fun to see how much he “gets it” as our Congressman. He tweets from the House floor about bills he’s voting on. He tweets as he’s going into or out of committee on who’s testifying, or what topic they are discussing. He tweets from events he attends as a Congressman. And he even occasionally tweets the mundane aspects of being a congressman like going out to eat (I’m sure he’s going to put on the “freshman 20″ without his wife to cook for him in Washington), or being singled out by TSA for a patdown…

And that conversation is very much two way. You can be one of Jason’s “followers” and he will then “follow” you (kind of like being Facebook friends), and you can PM (private message) him how you want him to vote on an upcoming piece of legislation, or just thank him for being such an awesome, conservative, principled congressman. Before, all you had was phone, fax and email with no sure way of knowing if your message was ever received by the intended recipient. Now you know for sure that they got it, and you may even get a message back when your congressman has the time to respond. As a constituent, having that kind of access to your congressman makes me feel a lot better about the political process.

Of course, just like with the Town Hall meetings, they can simply ignore you tweets. The wise legislator will understand the power of this technology and use it to be a better representative.